Stanford Briefings

Case Study: The Lane Hospitality Group

Chicago, Illinois

A Kantola customer since 2012

Formed by the Lane family in 1986 as a group of just three hotels, and currently owned by an independent investment company, AWH, the Lane Hospitality Group is a hotel management company with a current portfolio of 15 full service and premium select service hotel properties across the U.S., in association with Hilton, Marriott, InterContinental Hotels Group, and others. Debra Stinson, Vice President of Human Resources, is responsible for coordinating customer service and harassment training across all of Lane Hospitality's properties.

Missing the PowerPoint

"We've been looking to upgrade our training for a number of years," says Debra, "but online video training was cost prohibitive." In the past, Debra had the privilege of delegating the training function to the corporate trainer who traveled from location to location. "It was a challenge," she says, "trying to get everyone in the same room at the same time. It wasn't cheap either, and it was the same videos, year after year. The associates said, 'If I hear one more thing about smiling, I'm going to scream.' Last year, we went with a company that afforded us the opportunity to utilize our own PowerPoint presentations on demand, but they weren't stimulating and the associates didn't like them either."

New video, flexible features

When Debra came to Kantola Productions, she had a couple of specific needs. As a large company with multiple locations, she needed the associates to have the ability to self-register and create their own accounts, and she needed to be able to easily delegate training to administrators at each location, while still being able to keep track of training progress across the entire company. Kantola was able to build, test, and deploy such a system, and within a month Debra was training her first learners.

"Things have been going well so far, and we're planning to roll out waves of training over the coming year," says Debra. "Some people train at workstations at the hotels, and some do the training from their computers at home. We haven't had any issues so far, and people really like the live video: it's more interesting than a PowerPoint presentation." She’s also happy with the flexibility of the system, and Kantola’s upcoming product releases: "In the future, I look forward to being able to easily switch in a different video that will cover the same subject matter. It’s really important that we keep the material fresh and with the various Kantola products, we're able to do that."